October 1, 2016 | No Comments
Last year, back when polls favorable to Donald Trump were still being dismissed and skittish GOP candidates shied from confronting the blustery mogul, one group took him on directly. The Club for Growth, the deep-pocketed interest group that is feared by Republicans who come into its cross hairs for supporting tax or spending hikes, began running ads decrying Trump’s lack of conservative bona fides.
“There’s nothing conservative about supporting socialized single-payer health care,” intoned a typical TV spot. “There’s nothing conservative about giving money to the Clintons. There’s nothing conservative about Donald Trump.”
But in seeking to destroy Trump’s mystique, the Club only damaged its own—badly.
Trump gave no indication he was intimidated by a group that over the previous decade had earned a reputation for burying Republicans it considered ideologically impure. “They did this ad,” Trump said in rambling monologue in October 2015 at a casino on the Las Vegas strip. “The good news was it had no impact. The pictures were so beautiful. I want to find … Where did they get them? I was like 20 years younger. I looked so handsome. I never knew I was that goodlooking in a suit. I looked so good.”
From the moment Trump announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015 until he clinched the Republican nomination a year later, the Club for Growth waged a nonstop, $7 million campaign against him. Only one outside political organization spent more to advertise against Trump in the primaries—a Super PAC formed explicitly to defeat him. Yet, as Trump foresaw, the Club for Growth had little impact.
Indeed, the Club has been unusually vexed by Trump this election season. In the early Obama years, the group helped achieve its longstanding goal—the virtual annihilation of moderate Republicanism—by bankrolling Tea Party candidates. By 2015, it had become, arguably, the most influential anti-establishment interest group in politics and was closely aligned with the ascendant House Freedom Caucus. But in 2016, the Club for Growth watched in horror as millions of its ostensible supporters flocked to a candidate who shared few of its most cherished beliefs. Worse yet, Trump had won them over by co-opting the Club’s most reliable tactic—channeling anarchic rage at establishment politicians.
By early summer, faced with the prospect of two unpalatable general election candidates, Club elders were at wit’s end. Ken Blackwell, a conservative gadfly from Ohio, and a member of the Club for Growth’s eight-member board, compared his predicament to the one met by the Bread-and-Butterfly in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. “The character’s head is made out of a lump of sugar,” he explains. “His big dilemma was his food was hot tea. Classic dilemma. So the bread-and-butterfly had to decide whether to starve to death or have his head dissolve in his food.”
A return to normalcy seemed imminent after Trump clinched the GOP nomination and selected Mike Pence as his running mate. The Indiana governor, a hard-line fiscal conservative, was a longtime ally of the Club. The group licked its wounds, ceased its attacks on Trump and vowed to shift its attention back to congressional races.
But even there, a new threat had emerged. Fed up with the nihilistic legislative strategy of the far right—a strategy they felt was beginning to seriously hurt the Republican Party—a handful of establishment-aligned Super PACs began spending big money against the insurgent candidates supported by the Club for Growth. The anti-anti-establishment struck its first major blow in early August, when Club favorite Tim Huelskamp, the arch-conservative, naysayer-in-chief congressman from Kansas was handily defeated by a primary challenger. And in August, one of the Club’s preferred candidates lost a contested, big money House race in Florida. The Club for Growth’s long, miserable summer dragged on.
The divide between establishment Republicans and movement conservatives is not new. “But now with Trump,” says Brian Walsh, a consultant who worked for the outside group Ending Spending, to defeat Huelskamp, “you’ve seen this third leg.” Which means the Club for Growth is under assault from all sides. “The Club for Growth is both anti-Trump and anti-establishment,” Walsh says. “They’re seeing their slice of the GOP pie shrink.”
The Trump phenomenon has revealed a fissure that goes beyond mere political strategy. If the establishment loathes them, and grass-roots conservatives no longer adhere to their brand of fiscal conservatism, who, exactly, are the Club’s constituents?
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The Club was founded in 1999 by the banker/activists George Gilder and Thomas Rhodes, and the economic pundit Stephen Moore. All three were supply-siders in an era of moderate Republicanism. The group’s mission was to rid Washington of tax-and-spenders and replace them with extreme fiscal hawks. They occasionally targeted Democrats; in 2004 they ran a commercial that more or less accurately labeled Howard Dean as a “tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading” candidate.
More often, they aimed at the traitors within. “My experience as a member of Congress,” says former Rep. Chris Chocola (R-Ind.), who stepped down as president of the Club in 2014, “is that Republicans were more of the problem than Democrats, in the sense that Republicans ran on certain policies and never followed through. It all started back in 2002, when they passed campaign finance reform. In my view that’s when the Republicans of 1994 lost their soul.”
The Club’s impact was felt nationwide for the first time during the 2008 presidential election after they blanketed primary states with ads savaging Mike Huckabee’s economic populism, They called one ad about his tax increases in Arkansas, “Bill Clinton or Mike Huckabee?” (Huckabee in turn called them the “Club for Greed.”) In the 2010 cycle, thanks to the advent of the super PAC, the Club and the Club for Growth Action PAC, spent nearly $10 million supporting candidates—close to triple its previous output. Their darlings included incoming Sens. Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey, a former Club for Growth president. In 2012, that number doubled, as its super PAC sponsored Tea Party-approved senators like Jeff Flake and Ted Cruz. Suddenly, any sitting Republican to the left of Ayn Rand—the group wields scorecards—risked getting primaried by a Club-sponsored insurgent.
“The Club is not a grass-roots organization, and it’s never held itself out as one,” says Chocola, who is also a board member. “We don’t have armies of people on the ground.” Indeed, the group’s super PAC has historically been funded by a handful of super-rich white men, including financiers Jackson and Warren Stephens of Little Rock, New York hedge fund baron Robert Mercer and PayPal founder/Gawker Media bête noire Peter Thiel. But its messaging appealed to the conservative rank and file, and it was able to bankroll Tea Party populism from above. “When Ted Cruz … ‘shut the government down,’ people would ask, ‘What do you think of the guy now?’” says Chocola, “I’d say, ‘I love the guy. Tell me one thing he advocates that’s not in the GOP platform. The difference is he would actually fight for it.’” On economic issues, the Club’s politics and the GOP’s politics had begun to look virtually indistinguishable.
In 2011, though, Chocola sensed a populist Republican threat in the person of Donald J. Trump. Trump, mostly by re-igniting the “birther” movement, was making noises about a presidential run. Chocola quickly got on TV to highlight the New York mogul’s heresies, including a tax hike on the rich he’d advocated in 2000. “His alarming obsession with protectionist policies are automatic disqualifiers among free market conservatives,” Chocola said at the time. “This publicity stunt will sputter and disappear just as quickly as ‘The Apprentice’ is losing viewers.’”
The zingers kept coming well into the spring 2015, after Trump declared his presidential candidacy for real. In May, Club President David McIntosh met with the candidate at Trump Tower. Accounts of the event differ, but the result was that McIntosh wrote Trump a letter asking him for a donation of $1 million. He refused, the Club began airing attack ads, and a Twitter war broke out.
@realDonaldJTrump drew first: “The president of the pathetic Club for Growth came to my office in N.Y.C. and asked for a ridiculous $1,000,000 contribution. I said no way!”
@Club4Growth fired back: “Actually @realDonaldTrump asked mtg & then asked for races he could support. Thought he could buy us off. Worst Kind of Politician.”
As Trump’s candidacy grew more serious, The Club’s donors became more alarmed. Warren Stephens, the banker (and aspirational prog-rocker), pointed a reporter to a song he’d written for his band Rayburn about “certain political types.” Sample lyric: “You call your own shots/Breakin’ every law/Burning down what our fathers built.” Stephens and his brother, Jackson, each wound up donating $3 million to the Club. In February 2016, the Club for Growth’s super PAC raised over $4 million—its largest ever monthly haul.
In choosing to wage war on Trump, the Club, which typically focuses on Senate and House races, was entering virgin territory. “We were without question more aggressive in shining a light on Trump’s inconsistencies and departures from the principles that the Club represents,” Blackwell says. The board, he says, was more or less unanimous in supporting the strategy.
Results were mixed. The Club spent heavily in Wisconsin and Iowa, where its man Cruz prevailed. It also dropped several million dollars in Indiana and South Carolina, where Cruz lost. By the time Trump clinched the Republican nomination, ostensible allies were questioning the Club’s strategy. “I don’t think it was a wise use of money,” says Stephen Moore, the Club founder, now one of Trump’s economic advisers. “It was pretty likely that Trump was going to be the nominee for a long time.”
When I asked Club board members and allies why the attacks failed, most lamented the lack of sophistication of the primary electorate. “Most people don’t spend their day on free-market economics. They just like America, they like what America stood for,” says one person with deep ties to the Club. “People are willing to listen to Trump’s protectionist rhetoric,” Chocola says, “because the economy hasn’t grown, wages haven’t gone up, and they’re frustrated.” But, he adds, they’re wrong. “I would argue it’s not because of trade policies, but because of our tax policies, and regulations that stifle our economy. But people, they just see what they want to see.”
The existential threat implied by this heresy was not lost on the Club. Populist rage helps the Club achieve its goals— cutting taxes, basically—only when it is directed at “Big Government.” If the Tea Party rank and file suddenly care more about undocumented immigrants or the Islamic State or vanished factory jobs, the government might no longer really be the problem. “Trump had a unique strategy of going after what we had historically been going after,” Blackwell says, “but with policy initiatives that are not consistent with the Club’s.” And he was, of course, more successful than the Club.
Whatever was going on, there was no time for soul-searching. Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee and the Club for Growth had to decide what to do about it. The official line was that the Club would stop attacking Trump. “We have no regrets about the [anti-]Trump strategy. But the focus of the Club’s PAC is on House and Senate races, as it always has been,” spokesman Doug Sachtleben wrote me in an email. (Sachtleben declined to make McIntosh or any other club staff members available for interviews.) “I think the Club is trying to be helpful to Trump at this point,” Moore told me.
Still, the Club was tortured. After a Washington Post blog post included the Club for Growth in a list of conservative anti-Trump holdouts, Sachtleben wrote the paper with a clarification: “A spokesman for Club for Growth President David McIntosh says although he won’t support Trump, McIntosh is not part of the #NeverTrump movement.”
Finally, in July, the Club for Growth received some welcome news, when Trump selected Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate. During his congressional career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, nobody donated more to Pence than the Club. Pence also used to represent the 2nd District of Indiana (as had Chocola and McIntosh, strangely). Here was a man the Club could get behind. Club officials came out of hiding and started booking TV appearances. Crisis averted.
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Or maybe not. Along with less-moneyed contemporaries, like FreedomWorks and the Senate Conservatives Fund, the Club’s longtime strategy has been to unseat moderate Republicans. By 2015, enough of them had been replaced that the House Freedom Caucus, a group of about 40 far right, movement conservatives, had gained disproportionate influence on Capitol Hill. Led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, they annoyed the hell out of House Speaker John Boehner until he retired; threatening to shut down the government was a central component of their strategy.
The outsider-y Club had finally found some inside-the-Beltway pals. In fact, as POLITICO reported last month, there is a widespread feeling in Washington that the Club has become little more than a fundraiser for the Freedom Caucus, at the expense of any other agenda. “From my point of view,” says one GOP operative involved in House races against Club-backed candidates, “they have become more of an independent expenditure organization than the ideological organization they used to be.” The trouble with that is that voters and politicos alike are tiring of the Freedom Caucus’ obstructionist, all-or-nothing tactics.
There was no purer Freedom Caucus member than Tim Huelskamp, the goateed ex-farmer out of Kansas’s massive First Congressional District. Elected in 2010’s Tea Party wave, Huelskamp wound up casting a vote against a farm bill, of all things, and in 2012 got himself booted off the House Agriculture Committee. In 2014, he narrowly avoided a primary upset. But in 2015, he boasted a 100 percent rating from the Club for Growth—meaning he never cast a vote the group disagreed with. (Noted Bolsheviks Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell scored 73 percent and 62 percent, respectively.)
This year, Huelskamp’s constituents grew tired of his shtick and elected his challenger, an obstetrician, by a margin of 13 points. They had help from a handful of right-of-center super PACs spending big against Freedom Caucus candidates. Ending Spending, which supported Huelskamp’s opponent, dropped over $1 million on the race. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce dropped $400,000 and Strong Leadership for America PAC plowed in $280,000. The Club for Growth topped out at $420,000.
Ending Spending CEO Brian Baker insists his group—founded by TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts—isn’t ideologically at odds with the Club. “We have no interest in competing with the Club for Growth or FreedomWorks,” he told me. “We have great respect for those groups.” And yet, organizations like his are backing Club opponents with increasing regularity. “If the [Club for Growth] makes their top priority to increase the size of the House Freedom Caucus, what does that get?” asks a Republican strategist working with one such group. “On Nov. 9, you’re going to have a smaller House majority and possibly a larger House Freedom Caucus. That strikes me as a strange goal to have.”
In August, the Club was again defeated in an expensive, contested GOP primary when deep-red candidate Mary Thomas lost a House race in Florida. Once again, establishment-aligned super PACs did the heavy lifting against its candidate. Last summer wasn’t all bad for the Club; it propped up John Boehner’s successor in Ohio, among other Republican primary victors. And “as long as their consultants keep making money,” the GOP operative says, the Club probably isn’t going anywhere and probably won’t be adjusting its tactics.
Be that as it may, there remains a malaise about the new normal that the Trump candidacy has ushered in. @Club4Growth has long replaced its anti-Trump tweets with missives about Mike Pence and random Senate races. But Sachtleben, on his private account (997 followers), still tweets that Trump is “petty” and “thin-skinned” and “like a teenage boy.” Chocola for his part, doesn’t want his individual perspective to be conflated with the Club’s. But it can be assumed that they overlap. “Personally,” he confides, “I’m terrified.”